Everything you need to know about Jerry — how the AI works, what every sound cue means, how to outrun it in every mode, and the myths the community gets wrong.
The Murderpede is the sole active threat in Idols of Ash — a colossal, multi-segmented centipede with disturbingly human-facing visual design that hunts the player throughout the entire descent. The community has given it two names: Murderpede (descriptive) and Jerry (a coping mechanism — giving something terrifying a mundane name makes it feel smaller).
The Idols of Ash Murderpede cannot be fought. It cannot be blocked. It cannot be bargained with. Your only interaction with it is movement — specifically, moving faster and smarter than it can follow.
What makes it genuinely frightening as a game design choice is that it is not a scripted monster that appears at fixed moments. It is a dynamic AI entity that exists in the level continuously, adapts to your position in real time, and uses the environment in ways you cannot. It traverses walls and ceilings. It fits through gaps you cannot reach. It does not get tired.
Idols of Ash uses 3D spatial audio to communicate the Murderpede's distance and direction without requiring you to look at it. Learning to read these audio cues is the single most important skill in the game — more important than grapple technique, more important than route memory.
The sound changes along two axes: pitch (low → high as it gets closer) and frequency (slow ticks → rapid clicking). Learn to read both simultaneously.
| Sound description | Distance | Threat level | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silence / no audible chittering | Safe | Maintain pace, read lore if needed | |
| Slow, low-pitched clicks — faint, irregular | Distant | Keep moving, no panic needed | |
| Steady chittering, moderate pitch, consistent rhythm | Closing in | Pick up pace, avoid stopping | |
| Faster clicking, noticeably higher pitch, louder volume | Close | Accelerate now — drop, swing, fall | |
| Rapid high-pitched rattling + audible leg scraping on stone | Imminent | Take any downward route immediately | |
| Loud mechanical clicking directly above + visual shadow | Contact | Drop everything and fall — survive at any cost |
Flat stereo speakers compress spatial audio into two channels, making directional detection nearly impossible. If you are playing on laptop speakers or a TV with basic sound, you are missing the directional component entirely. Even cheap earbuds give you significantly better distance and direction information than open speakers.
The Idols of Ash Murderpede is not a scripted cinematic monster — it runs real-time dynamic pathfinding that recalculates continuously based on your position. Understanding how it thinks is the key to consistently outmaneuvering it.
The Murderpede is not bound by the same geometry as the player. It can run across walls, ceilings, and structural beams that are completely inaccessible to you. A ledge you cannot reach is not a safe haven — it may already be on the other side.
Every fraction of a second, it recalculates the shortest path to your coordinates. It does not follow a fixed patrol route. If you change direction, it adjusts. If you drop suddenly, it recalculates. It is always tracking you.
In harder difficulties, the AI appears to anticipate your trajectory rather than simply following from behind. It positions itself at narrow gaps and bottlenecks before you reach them. This is the behavior that makes Nightmare genuinely threatening — it is not just faster, it is smarter.
The Murderpede's pathfinding is optimized for downward and lateral pursuit. Moving sharply upward — climbing rope, ascending ledges — causes a noticeable recalculation delay. A short vertical retreat buys time to reassess a route, though it is not a sustainable strategy.
Community observation: the Murderpede will sometimes position itself directly over a hole or gap that leads to the next section, blocking your primary descent route. When this happens, you need an alternate route rather than waiting it out.
Every grapple hook fired contributes to its awareness of your position. In theory, moving silently would reduce its tracking efficiency — but since silence means not grappling, and not grappling means not descending, this is not a practical survival strategy.
Before v1.11, a bug caused the Murderpede to become passive — players nicknamed this the creature being "too shy." The v1.11 hotfix restored it to full aggression. If you see community posts describing a passive Murderpede, they are describing pre-patch behavior. In all current versions (v1.11 onward), it is always actively hunting.
The Idols of Ash Murderpede scales significantly across the three difficulty modes — not just in speed, but in behavior patterns and the number of instances you face.
| Attribute | Normal | Nightmare | First Kiln |
|---|---|---|---|
| Count | 1 | 1 (+ occasional 2nd) | Up to 4 simultaneously |
| Movement speed | Manageable — outpaced by steady grappling | Significantly faster — pausing is punished hard | Fast — but multiple directions at once |
| AI behavior | Reactive — follows your path | Predictive — anticipates chokepoints | Coordinated — approach from multiple angles |
| Aggression | Continuous but forgiving | Relentless — very little breathing room | Constant from all directions |
| Can you outpace it? | Yes, with steady grappling | Only with optimal routing | Yes, but requires reading all 4 positions |
| Passive bug present? | Fixed in v1.11 | Never present | Never present |
The Murderpede's pursuit is optimized for your current position. Every meter you descend increases the path it has to recalculate. Consistent downward movement is more valuable than perfect grapple execution — a messy fast descent beats a clean slow one every time.
When you are cornered or the Murderpede is blocking your only route down, climbing sharply upward for 3–5 seconds causes a noticeable recalculation pause. Use this to buy time to spot an alternate route — but do not stay up. Vertical retreat is a tactic, not a strategy.
Tight corners, narrow horizontal passages, and areas with multiple vertical shafts all force the Murderpede to recalculate longer paths. The Aqueduct — the secret water-logged section accessible via a hidden gate near the central pillar at mid-depth — is faster but more complex, and its geometry can create more distance against pursuit.
When you hear the Murderpede loud in your right ear, it is approaching from the right. Choose your next hook point to move left and down, not straight down. Lateral movement that also descends is more efficient than pure downward movement when it is approaching from the side.
In Nightmare, vitality shards (glowing green/blue orbs) are placed in difficult positions deliberately. Collect them at 60% health or below — not at full health. You need them later when a bad fall or contact hit drops you suddenly. Hoarding them at full health wastes the resource.
A common instinct when the Murderpede is close: stop moving and hide. This is almost always wrong. Stopping makes you a stationary target. The only exception is a very brief pause to identify your next hook point — and that pause should be under two seconds.
Idols of Ash First Kiln replaces the single Murderpede with up to four simultaneous instances. This changes the fundamental survival calculus: you are no longer managing one threat from one direction — you are reading a three-dimensional threat field.
In Normal and Nightmare, your audio radar tracks one signal. In First Kiln, you are tracking four signals simultaneously from different directions. The skill is not just "move faster" — it is audio triage: which of the four is closest, which direction is it approaching from, and which route down avoids all four for the next 10 seconds.
With four signals in your audio field, focus on the loudest and highest-pitched. That is the closest instance. Make your routing decision based on avoiding that one first, then the second loudest. The farthest two are secondary concerns.
The final area of First Kiln is pitch black — not just dark, but completely unlit. Set your monitor brightness to maximum and crank the in-game brightness slider before you descend into this section. You cannot navigate what you cannot see, and you cannot hear all four Murderpedes and also read platforms in total darkness.
First Kiln has zero Ash Urns. Every death restarts from the top. This changes your risk tolerance: in Normal you could afford a bad fall at 40% health knowing a checkpoint was nearby. In First Kiln, treat every health point as irreplaceable. The conservative route is the correct route, even if it costs time.
Embers (the First Kiln healing collectibles) are placed in high-risk positions. Collect one whenever you drop below 50% health — they are not worth the positional risk at higher health. Unlike Ash Urns, they do not pause momentum, so you can collect them mid-movement.
For context on the difficulty ceiling: Leafy Games themselves have confirmed they have not completed First Kiln (Inverted), the hardest mode added in v1.14. Standard First Kiln is conquerable — but it is the hardest thing most players will attempt in any game this year.
Several pieces of Idols of Ash Murderpede "wisdom" circulate in the community that range from partially true to completely false. Here is what the evidence actually supports.
The Murderpede's pathfinding is position-based, not movement-based. Standing still does not make you less detectable — it just means you are a stationary target that is now easier to reach. The only reliable way to "lose" it is to descend far enough that the pathing distance becomes very long.
This described pre-v1.11 behavior — the "too shy" bug. That bug was fixed. In all current versions, the Murderpede is always in full pursuit state. If you experienced passive behavior recently, you may be on an outdated build or a pirated version with the old code.
Confirmed. Rotating your camera backward during movement reduces forward momentum in the physics engine. This is intentional game design — the Murderpede is an audio threat, not a visual one. Looking back is both mechanically punishing and strategically useless.
It can pursue upward, but there is a recalculation delay when you move sharply upward that creates a brief gap. This is exploitable as a short tactical retreat but not as a sustained strategy — it will follow you up eventually.
The Murderpede is position-based, not noise-triggered in any meaningful way that affects its speed. Grapple hooks do contribute to its position awareness, but you cannot grapple silently and also descend — this myth leads players to try slowing down, which is counterproductive.
Community observation supports this — the Murderpede does appear to position at chokepoints in harder difficulties. Whether this is emergent behavior from the pathfinding (it takes the same efficient route you do, arriving first) or deliberate predictive AI is unclear. Either way, the effect is real: sometimes your primary route is occupied and you need an alternate.
Idols of Ash's design is not accidental. Every element of the Idols of Ash Murderpede — its behavior, its inability to be fought, its relentlessness, even its community nicknames — maps onto the game's central themes of grief and loss.
This is the game's core emotional statement. Grief cannot be defeated. It cannot be killed, pushed away, or argued with. The only viable relationship with it is movement — keep descending, keep going forward, do not stop. The moment you stop and try to confront it directly, it catches you.
The mechanical rule — turning to look at the Murderpede reduces your speed — is also the game's emotional advice. Looking back at what you have lost, dwelling on it, trying to see it clearly — slows you down. The game tells you this with its physics.
Giving something terrifying a mundane, friendly name is a documented psychological coping mechanism — it reduces the perceived power of the threat by making it familiar and diminished. "I got caught by Jerry again" is less overwhelming than "I was consumed by grief and trauma again." The community arrived at this instinctively. The game designed the space for it.
One Murderpede is manageable. Four is overwhelming. The escalation is not arbitrary difficulty inflation — the First Kiln represents the deepest layer of the psychological trial, where grief is compounded, where loss comes from every direction simultaneously. The true ending requires surviving this. Surviving it — not defeating it, just surviving it and reaching the bottom — is what the game defines as transcendence.
For the full lore analysis, see the endings explained page and the lore section.